Steam is absolutely going nuts for the next week and a half. The service is holding its “Perils of Summer Sale” until July 4, discounting tons of both individual games and publisher/developer bundles. You want nearly every non-sports game made by 2K Games including Borderlands, Bioshock 2, and the complete X-COM series? $90, a full 75% off. You want every good Star Wars game except the space sims and the LEGO games? $75, 55% off.

The bundles on sale include:

• Call of Duty Collection – $29.99 (75% off; doesn’t include Modern Warfare 2)
• Rockstar Complete Pack – $63.74 (25% off)
• 2K Games Complete Pack – $89.99 (75% off)
• THQ Complete Pack – $49.99 (50% off)
• Star Wars Collection – $74.99 (55% off)
• Square-Enix/Eidos Collection – $74.99 (25% off)
• Valve Complete Pack – $66.99 (33% off)
• Introversion Complete Pack- $5.00 (83% off)

Besides the bundles, Steam is also selling individual games at different discounts based on the publisher. Capcom games are 33% off. Codemasters games are 75% off. Atari games are 66% off. If you’ve been meaning to beef up your PC games catalog, now’s the best time to do it.

Ni no Kuni: The Another World, the oft-delayed DS collaboration between Studio Ghibli and Level-5, is coming to the PS3 as well, according to Famitsu scans found by Siliconera. The game stars 13-year-old Oliver, a young boy who’s decided to travel to NinoKuni, a parallel world, in hopes of reviving his recently deceased mother. Ninokuni is inhabited with alternate versions of people he knows: Layla, a lady who sells milk in the real world, becomes Kaula, the Queen of Vavalencia with an insatiable appetite. Shelley, a girl who’s sick and cannot go outside in the real world becomes Marl, a fearless girl who loves to sing. Oliver also meets a talking rat named Magooru, a strange parallel to his real-world friend Mark.

Ni no Kuni: Shikkoku no Madoushi, the DS game, is scheduled for release on December 9 of this year in Japan, with the PS3 version, Ni no Kuni: Shiroki Seihai no Joou, coming out later in 2011. The DS version will be the first game shipped on a 4Gb DS cart, making it the largest DS game shipped to date and bringing it to the same size as most PlayStation 1 games.

Check out the trailer for Ni no Kuni: The Another World

I like my webcomics obscenity-filled and my headgear ridiculously ironic. That’s why this hat is the greatest thing I picked up at PAX East last spring. It’s the Merch hat, from the PAX merchandise booth at the expo. Among the various t-shirts, hoodies, and books, stood this singular, awesome hat.

For those unfamiliar with the Merch, it’s a fictional character created five years ago in Penny Arcade as a spoof on overly merchandise-driven characters. Like the comic says, the Merch is a happy, smiling, adorable blue cartoon character who, when children don’t buy his merchandise, becomes the Fleshreaper, collector of torsos.

The East Coast got its own taste of the newest Xbox 360 toy yesterday at the Microsoft Preview event held on Manhattan’s west side. It was a shindig for all of Microsoft’s pursuits, from Windows 7 to Office to Arc mice and keyboards to, of course, Kinect. The company showed off the product in all its flailing glory, highlighting several upcoming titles for the device.

In general, Kinect felt very much like a beta, or a proof-of-concept input device. It tracked my arm and body movements reasonably well, but got tripped up when I moved my legs. It also felt very laggy, with pauses up to a full second for gestures to process. In fairness, it was a large room with awkward lighting unlike most living rooms, so maybe it’s more accurate in a smaller, more conventional home theater setting.

Remember Heavenly Sword? Did you like it? How about Dragon Ball? Do you like that? What is I told you someone was making a game based on the 2 mixed together? Enslaved is based on the classic Chinese novel, Journey to the West, the same novel that Dragon Ball creator Akira Toriyama based his work one. The game is being made by Ninja Theory, who previously made Heavenly Sword, one of the PS3′s more highly touted early games.

Enslaved releases this October on the PS3 and the 360.

Two big, awesome deals this week. First, you can pick up the new, shiny arcade racer Blur for as low as $10, depending on how lucky you are at Best Buy. Slickdeals recently posted this combination coupon: a $20 off manufacturer coupon combined with a $10 off Best Buy Rewards Zone coupon means the $40 game falls down to a very affordable $10.

Of course, it relies on sheer luck at Best Buy. You have to find a cashier who will enter both coupons without issue, and that’s a crapshoot. Slickdeals readers have gotten about a 50% success rate at getting both coupons to apply. Still, even with just the $20 coupon, it means Blur’s down to $20 and that’s still pretty good.

Second, both Deus Ex games are on sale on Steam for $5. Deus Ex is still one of the best games ever released on the PC in the last 15 years, and Deus Ex: Invisible War, while deeply flawed, was still entertaining and, with tweaks, a worthwhile playthrough. Both games are usually $10 each, but the 10th anniversary of Deus Ex means the games get a 75% discount. Get them. They’re worth the $5.

This will be controversial. El Shaddai is more or less the Bible as filtered through Japanese anime aesthetics. It is very pretty, but hope Fox News stays the hell away.

El Shaddai will be coming out on PS3 and 360.

(You didn’t think I was done, did you?)
This is a beautiful game, but I do have a concern. I really don’t love the furry fandom and I fear this amazing looking game will suffer a backlash from like minded people.

Dust: An Elysian Tail is coming out exclusively for XBLA

[Tuesday's Trope is a weekly department highlighting an amusing video game trope from TVTropes. Aggrogate is not affiliated with TVTropes.org in any way. All trope examples come from TVTropes and are shared via the Creative Commons license.]

Sometimes we don’t get any choices in video games. And sometimes we get choices, but unless we make the “right” one the game stops us in our tracks. If you’re asked whether you want to save the world and you say “No,” odds are the game will respond, “But thou must!”

This is particularly popular in old-school console RPGs, when you’re given an obvious objective and any choice is just a formality. Still, it can appear in nearly any game with a storyline.

Examples of But Thou Must include:

Wizards of the Coast is rolling out a new expansion to Magic: The Gathering, and it’s actually pretty awesome. Instead of the standard new decks/sets/cards, the Archenemy expansion introduces an entire new game type that puts an entire party of players against a single, powerful opponent.

It’s a new twist on MtG that could work very well. The “Archenemy” gets twice as many life points and a separate deck of “schemes,” much larger cards with remarkable and powerful effects. The different players really need to work together to defeat the Archenemy, because the schemes let him regularly do things like destroy several permanents at once, drop a 5/5 flying dragon token on the table, or simply deal direct damage to each player and take that damage as health.

That isn’t the awesome part of Archenemy, though. The truly awesome aspect of the expansion is the names on the scheme cards. Every single scheme sounds like the track on a death metal album.